Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed

Lindsay Fenlock is a senior researcher in the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). Nikki Reisch is a human rights lawyer and social justice advocate who leads the Climate & Energy Program at CIEL.

Much has been written about when fossil fuel companies knew their products cause harm to the climate, public health, and the environment. Less attention has been paid to just how long governments have known, too, and what they did or failed to do with that knowledge. That information is not just a matter of historical record – it’s a matter of legal responsibility. 

A year ago this month, the world’s highest court affirmed that countries have been under an obligation to curb climate change since they knew about the foreseeable risks it posed and to remedy its harms. This historic advisory opinion opened the door for States to be held accountable not only for failing to act on climate change, but also for making it worse by perpetuating its primary cause: fossil fuel production and use.

While the ruling is clear about the content of climate duties under international law, it is silent on when those duties first applied to specific countries or how long they have been breaching them. The earlier governments knew about the drivers and dangers of climate change, the longer they have been under an obligation to prevent it, and the greater their potential liability for the resulting harms.

Lindsay Fenlock is a senior researcher in the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). Nikki Reisch is a human rights lawyer and social justice advocate who leads the Climate & Energy Program at CIEL.

Much has been written about when fossil fuel companies knew their products cause harm to the climate, public health, and the environment. Less attention has been paid to just how long governments have known, too, and what they did or failed to do with that knowledge. That information is not just a matter of historical record – it’s a matter of legal responsibility. 

A year ago this month, the world’s highest court affirmed that countries have been under an obligation to curb climate change since they knew about the foreseeable risks it posed and to remedy its harms. This historic advisory opinion opened the door for States to be held accountable not only for failing to act on climate change, but also for making it worse by perpetuating its primary cause: fossil fuel production and use.

While the ruling is clear about the content of climate duties under international law, it is silent on when those duties first applied to specific countries or how long they have been breaching them. The earlier governments knew about the drivers and dangers of climate change, the longer they have been under an obligation to prevent it, and the greater their potential liability for the resulting harms.

Once they were informed of the risks fossil fuels posed to the climate, States had a duty to do everything in their power to prevent those risks from materializing – and at a minimum, to refrain from exacerbating them. But, as trends in fossil fuel dependence and climate destruction make clear, they did not.

Early knowledge

A new report from the Center for International Environmental Law shows that the governments of many major emitting countries have known since at least the 1960s that fossil fuel use was warming the planet and, if continued, could lead to dire impacts –  including melting of the polar ice caps, catastrophic sea level rise, and extreme heat.

Yet some of the countries responsible for the largest cumulative shares of carbon emissions have claimed that global awareness of climate change emerged only in the late 1980s, around the time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established and negotiations of a climate convention began.

Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources

Why? Because admitting that they have known about the chief causes and foreseeable consequences of climate change for the better part of a century would mean they had a duty to prevent it that they’ve been flouting for decades.

Drawing  on a wide range of publicly available government records and scientific studies, CIEL’s research exposes when knowledge of climate change made its way onto policymakers’ desks and into public discourse. The report synthesizes some of the groundbreaking research by scholars such as Naomi Oreskes on the history of American climate science, putting their findings into a legal context and broadening the discussion to other countries.

First findings in 19th century

The origins of the climate harms the world is experiencing today – more extreme storms, deadly heat waves, floods, and sea level rise – stem from around 1850, when industry began burning so much fossil fuel that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise.

Scientists figured out quite quickly that the release of these ancient carbon stores could warm Earth. The first paper that modeled the potential warming impact of fossil fuel use, for example, came out in 1896, while the first studies that confirmed global temperatures were rising came out before World War II. 

Government records show international cooperation on climate change research picking up around 1957, when countries worldwide coordinated funding for thousands of research projects as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY).

The IGY spawned the world’s first program to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and the 69 participating governments were apprised of the results. By this time, governmental scientific organizations in most of the world knew that continued fossil fuel use could heat the planet dramatically, with potentially significant adverse impacts. Many countries also became aware of industry research on climate change during this decade through their state-owned oil companies.

Big emitters knew

In the 1960s, the world’s top atmospheric scientists, chemists, and geophysicists concluded that fossil fuel emissions not only could warm the earth, but they were already doing so. They also concluded that continuing to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was likely to cause serious harm to food systems, ecosystems, human health, and communities, including through sea level rise and deadly extreme weather events. By the 1960s and 1970s, many governments had ample warning that continued reliance on fossil fuels could have profoundly dangerous global consequences. 

Evidence indicates that this information reached public officials —  in some cases at the highest echelons of government. In the United States –  the largest historic emitter of carbon dioxide –  White House officials exchanged memos over what to do about the “carbon dioxide problem” during the 1960s and a presidential report published in 1965 unequivocally attributed warming to fossil fuels and warned about catastrophic levels of temperature and sea level rise if trends continued. 

In the United Kingdom, the greenhouse effect was first raised in a parliamentary debate in 1969, and in France, a state-owned oil company published a magazine article about the dangers of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1971, while the Canadian environment ministry regularly published articles about climate change in its employee magazine throughout the 1970s and 80s. 

Even the most generous reading of this information shows that many of the world’s largest contributors to climate change, including the United States, Canada, Germany, and Australia,  knew enough to change course over two decades before the first meeting of the IPCC  in 1988, if not far earlier. 

The story does not end there. As an illustrative compilation of publicly available, English-language evidence, CIEL’s report is not a complete survey of what all major emitters knew.  And facts about what a given country knew are not, on their own, sufficient to secure accountability. But, together with evidence about how that knowledge was subsequently acted upon –  or, as was often the case, denied, dismissed, and distorted – and about how climate impacts have unfolded, they solidify foundations for climate justice and repair.